This article focuses on the political and institutional process by which
the privatisation policy was approved in Argentina during the 1990s. It
concentrates mainly on the relationships that the President maintained with
Congress and the political parties sitting in it. By looking through the lens of the
privatisation case-study, the article aims to analyse the institutional capacity of
Argentine democratic presidents to enact policy reforms. The article shows that
the Presidency's constitutional resources in combination with the President's
strong base of partisan support permitted the adoption of the innovative
privatisation policy at an institutional level. However, the article also explains that
the political and institutional resources of the Presidency were not invariable
and permanent. Rather, the approval of the privatisation policy shows that policy-making
processes involve a dialogue between President and Congress, an
institutional interchange that can serve either to enhance or to constrain the
powers of the President. By showing that congressional intervention should not
be underestimated, this article claims that the Argentine presidential regime is
better characterised as one of limited centralism than as an example of hyper-presidentialism. The first characterisation not only acknowledges the complexity
of the institutional relations, but also the fact that, given a situation of presidential
centralism, institutional relations are variable and, most importantly, contingent
upon political conditions.
